The Blood Star

by Nicholas Guild

  Finally one of them approached and addressed a question to us in a tongue I had never heard before. I answered him, first in Arabic and then in Aramaic, with which, as it turned out, he had a halting familiarity.

  “Have you any food?” I asked.

  “Yes, and wine too. Have you the means to pay for them?”

  “Yes—trade goods. You will not find yourself poorer for your hospitality to us. What is this place?”

  “The oasis at Inpey, a bad place.”

  “I have seen some that were worse.”

  He regarded me for a moment through narrow, inquisitive eyes, as if he did not believe me. He was a dark-skinned man who looked as if he was accustomed to shaving his face and scalp but had neglected to do so for four or five days. His face was pinched and suspicious and carried a few scars which, from his general appearance, I would guess he had acquired in tavern brawls. He was wearing what must once have been a uniform of some sort. I did not like him very well.

  “Who are you?” he asked finally. “Where have you come from?”

  “We are travelers, shipwrecked by pirates,” I answered, not really expecting to be believed. “That was five and twenty days ago, I think, but perhaps I have lost count.”

  “You have been five and twenty days in the desert?”

  “So it seems.”

  He laughed at this. It was not a pleasant laugh.

  “Then you have done well to stay alive. Men have died out there in three. Pay me first, and I will bring you wine and bread and the flesh of a goose killed only yesterday.”

  Among the items for which the nomads had murdered Enkidu’s former master was a silver cup, well worked and weighing not less than ten shekels. I gave it to our host.

  “We will stay here a few days,” I said, “until we are replenished and fit to go on. This should compensate you for our support until then. What is the way to Egypt from here?”

  “North, to the fortress at Tufa. Beyond that is a port where ships stop before entering the Duck’s Foot. They will take you anywhere upriver you wish to go.”

  “What is this ‘Duck’s Foot’?”

  He laughed again, as if I must be a fool not to know.

  “The many legs of Mother Nile—they spread wide before the sea tickles her, for she is an old harlot.”

  “Thank you. Now, if it pleases you, we would eat and drink.”

  The wine was watered, and the whole jug would not have cost two copper pieces in Nineveh. The bread was plentiful but stale. The goose had died of old age long before yesterday. Yet we were more than content and thought ourselves very well provided for. Such is the effect of deprivation.

  That evening, when we had rested and washed our sunburned limbs, delighting in the coolness and the abundance of water, the slaves began filing out of a stone hut built over the opening of the mine where they had labored all day. A long chain shackled them together at the wrist, but this precaution seemed unnecessary. I have never seen men in a more abject state—starved and listless, their skins grown pale as limestone from months of working underground, far from the sun’s sacred light. They walked, hardly troubling to lift their feet, but they seemed less alive than the dust caked onto their legs.

  “What have they done to be punished so?” I asked.

  “They are criminals,” was the answer. “They have angered Pharaoh and must be punished for it. A year in this place will finish any man, so they will not suffer long. No need to pity them.”

  They had angered ‘Pharaoh’—the name the Egyptians give their king, whom they believe to be a god. In the Land of Ashur only prisoners of war and traitors would have been punished thus, but in Egypt a farmer can anger Pharaoh by not being able to pay his taxes in a year of bad harvests. A poor man who runs afoul of a priest can end his life in the mines. I understood what the soldier had meant when he called this ‘a bad place’. In a few days, when our strength had come back, we were glad to leave.

  “The fortress at Tufa is but two days from here. The trail is well marked, and there is water.”

  “Will we be received kindly there?”

  “That is between you and the commander. You will have to offer him a substantial bribe, for he has many officers under him with whom he will be obliged to share it. Otherwise, he will decide you are up to some mischief and feed you to the vultures.”

  “Leave this commander to your servant,” Kephalos said to me, as soon as we were on our way north. “I understand such men better than you. All will be well.”

  Traveling at night, we set a better pace than, apparently, the Egyptians did, so we arrived at Tufa midway through the morning of the second day. The fortress walls were made of sandstone, no more than three times the height of a man, and enclosed an area anyone might walk around in an hour. I guessed that the garrison was probably two hundred strong and that they did not live in much dread of attack—we were within half a beru of the gates before a rider came out to challenge us. As he escorted us inside, I saw that the walls were hung with corpses left dangling head-down from ropes tied round their ankles. It was not an encouraging sight.

  “Leave all to me,” Kephalos said. “Stay behind with the Macedonian and do not let him kill anyone. I will speak for us all.”

  So Enkidu and I waited on the parade ground, under the bright sun, surrounded by soldiers who perhaps were merely curious but looked as if they were anticipating the pleasure of hanging us over the wall with their other trophies.

  It was an hour before Kephalos returned.

  “The commander does not believe that we could have crossed the desert from the Red Sea,” he said, quite calmly, as if relating a trifle. “He affects to believe we are spies, yet he is willing to lay aside his suspicions since I have written a letter under my own seal to a business acquaintance of mine, one Prodikos, a merchant of the city of Naukratis, who will come here to vouch for us—bringing with him two talents of gold, which will speak to the commander far louder than Prodikos ever could. The commander is a practical man and realizes that no spy has such a sum at his disposal.”

  “And this Prodikos, you are sure he will come?”

  “He will if he is still alive, and he was two years ago when I deposited many more than two talents of gold with him. If he is dead, then the commander will have us killed, but the journey is at least ten days in each direction and we are thus safe enough for a while. The commander will treat us well, for two talents of gold is more than he could have hoped to see in his whole life—he finds great merit in having been born the son of a scribe attached to the royal granary, so his notions of wealth are modest enough.”

  And it was true that while we awaited the arrival of Prodikos we were not on the footing of prisoners but were treated with the courtesy which is normally extended to diplomatic hostages. Since there was nowhere within two days’ journey to which we could have escaped, we were left unguarded and enjoyed the liberty of the fortress. After the Wilderness of Sin, it was an agreeable enough place.

  For the first few days there, I had the curious sense of having ended one life to be born into another. I had evaded death so many times since my flight from Nineveh that I started to entertain the hope that the Lady Ereshkigal, Mistress of the Dark Realm, had at last forfeited her claim to me and that I might now begin once more, as someone else. Tiglath Ashur, son of Sennacherib—the world I was about to enter knew nothing of him. I could be as other men in that world. I could begin to think myself safe.

  Thus do I bear witness to my own folly, for there is no greater fool than he who assumes that the gods have grown blind to him.

  The fortress at Tufa afforded little in the way of amusement. One day I reached such a pitch of boredom as actually to be driven to playing the old soldier and inspecting the fortifications. Like the spy the commander pretended to believe me, I measured the height and thickness of the walls, climbed into the watchtowers to see how well they covered the surrounding area, and satisfied myself as to the water supply and the size and location of the
storehouses. In short, I learned all that would be needful to me to know should I ever command an army laying siege to this place.

  But a siege appeared to be the last thing the garrison at Tufa expected. Indeed, at this outpost of the mighty Kingdom of Egypt, a land of wealth and power, fabled for a thousand years as the mighty sovereign of the west, the dry rot of inactivity had taken such firm hold that the men there seemed almost to have forgotten they were ever meant to be warriors.

  I had seen such garrisons before—indeed, I had once commanded one, at Amat, among the northern mountains in the Land of Ashur—places on the borders of empire where men are sent as a punishment, men whom no officer wants in his command. All the same symptoms were present at Tufa: the slovenly uniforms, the parade grounds littered with refuse, the watch details who spent their time gambling.

  Such was the garrison at Tufa, guardian of the eastern approaches to Egypt. Given ten days, I decided, five hundred good men could crack it open like a pea pod—and this took no account of the fact that it was garrisoned by Egyptians, who did not seem a race very gifted as soldiers.

  Their talents seemed rather to lie in cruelty, an impression formed at the oasis at Inpey and confirmed here at Tufa. Even the men of Ashur, whom all the world feared, would not have thought to adorn their own city walls with the corpses of their victims, and yet on my tour of the fortress perimeter I counted no less than fifteen hanging from the walls, some quite fresh and some rotted almost to skeletons.

  Who were they? I wondered. And what crimes had they committed to be punished thus? Perhaps some had been thieves or murderers or spies, or perhaps this was how the Egyptians punished serious breaches of discipline among their soldiers. One or two wore the tatters of what might once have been uniforms, but the rest gave no clues to their identity.

  Save one. Hanging from the northeast corner of the fortress wall was the body of a man who, from his general condition, looked as if he had been dead no more than a month. There was a wind that day to carry off the stink of putrefaction, so I had no hesitation in venturing quite close—one will take an interest in anything if there is little enough else to do. I had a good look at him. It was difficult to tell for certain, but he might have been fairly young when he died. His head was shaved, like an Egyptian or, perhaps, one of my own countrymen who has taken a vow of atonement to some god.

  On his left hand, the last finger was missing.

  IX

  In my dream there had been five. Five eagles swooping down for the kill. But now three were dead, and I was still alive. That left but two. Where were they waiting for me?

  I now understood the vanity of imagining I could escape this. The dream would assume flesh and find me out—it did not matter where I hid myself.

  This time I made no inquiries. I spoke of it to no one. The corpse hanging from the fortress wall at Tufa would remain that of a nameless traveler executed for an obscure crime, or perhaps merely because he was suspected. There was nothing the Egyptians could tell me I did not know already.

  I tried to turn my mind into other paths.

  Fifteen days later a supply train arrived from the coast, and with it traveled Prodikos, merchant of Naukratis, carrying with him several leather purses filled with gold and silver coins, a cedar chest containing new garments of the most elegant linen, a large basket of fruit preserved in honey, a calf just weaned for fresh meat, and two vast jars of the finest Lebanese wine.

  This Prodikos, though he shaved his head and face and dressed after the Egyptian fashion, even to painting his eyelids, was a Greek, born in the City of Megara, who as a young man had settled in one of the Greek colonies in the “Duck’s Foot”—which he called the Delta of the Nile—and there made his fortune in the dye trade between Egypt and the Phoenician cities of Tyre and Sidon. Although very fat and much troubled with the gout, he was an active man with a happy temperament, a lover of money and luxury and, in his youth at least, a great traveler who had been west as far as Carthage and east to Meskineh on the upper reaches of the Euphrates. They had never met, being known to each other only through business correspondence, but he and Kephalos fell in together at once, as if they had been intimate since childhood.

  “The dealings I have entered into on behalf of Master Kephalos and yourself have prospered exceedingly,” he told me at dinner that first night, when he had grown a little drunk and thus was disposed most generously to let that intimacy embrace me as well. “So much so that the few talents of gold you will distribute among the soldiers here, that they may buy their way out of Pharaoh’s army and set up with a wife and a hundred plethra of muddy land and thus consider themselves rich men, are as nothing. You will be like a great noble, living in a palace with fine gardens, with slaves beyond numbering and pretty, fair-skinned women for your bed.

  “Only follow the advice I give you as if you were my own son and always study to keep yourself clear of the intrigues of these Egyptians. Sleep with their wives if it amuses you and let Master Kephalos tease them out of their money, for they are a light people, without morals or wisdom. Live only for your own amusement and you will die an old man full of pleasant memories. But do not meddle with their priests or interfere with their statecraft, for these are troubled times along the Mighty Nile and not all the crocodiles are in the river.”

  “Then perhaps I should make my home in one of the Greek settlements of the Delta.”

  “No, My Lord, for you would find it a constraining existence. The merchants who abide in a foreign land may hoard up great wealth, but they live modestly lest they excite the envy of their neighbors. Such is not for you, who was born to another way. Were I a young man, with such wealth and liberty as blesses you, I would dwell in Memphis, which is perhaps the greatest city in the world and contains all that can bring joy to the heart of youth. Visit Memphis and gorge on it. Afterwards, have a good vomit to purge your bowels of such follies and then continue on with the rest of your life.”

  “Very well then, Master Prodikos, it shall be as you say.”

  And so it was. Kephalos saw to bribing the garrison commander and even distributed small sums of money to the common soldiers, in case any man should feel himself ill-used through our having escaped execution as spies—a fugitive from a powerful king, he argued, must take elaborate precautions.

  When the supply train set out on its return journey, we accompanied it, arriving three days later by the shores of the Northern Sea, which the Greeks call merely “the Sea,” as if there were no other. From there we took ship to the second mouth of the Nile and then upriver to Naukratis, altogether a journey of some eight days.

  We traveled under sail, since the winds blew quite steadily from the sea and the river seemed to have almost no current. At that time, at least, I cannot claim to have been much impressed with the Mighty Nile, which was narrower in its banks than the Tigris and slower than the Euphrates is even in mid-winter. I had to remind myself that this was only one of many branchings and that to be fair I would have to reserve judgment until we broke out of the Delta and encountered the main river on our passage up to Memphis.

  Still, it was pleasant enough to stand in the prow of our little ship, which was carrying wool from Joppa, and to watch the countryside floating by. Egypt seemed a rich land, a land of date palms and thick green fields, a land of sunshine and water. I remembered the words of the Arab sailor, who had said a man might live all his life here and die content.

  Yet even here there were indications that we had not left the world’s cruelty behind us. Once I saw an ox, which must somehow have gotten loose, wandering into the water up to its belly. The crocodiles, which seem to be cunning brutes, came in behind it, cutting it off from the bank, and within a few minutes there was nothing left but a red stain on the water.

  “Not all the crocodiles are in the river,” Prodikos had said.

  . . . . .

  Naukratis, where we arrived in the middle of the afternoon, was a busy mud-brick town, very hot and swarming with flies. Our s
hip tied up barely long enough to let us off and then was on its way south again, as if there could be nothing in such a place to hold it. Yet, as my travels among the Arabs had taught me, the outward signs of wealth are not everywhere the same as at my father’s court in Nineveh, and it was obvious that vast quantities of money changed hands along this crowded harbor, where cedar wood, bales of cloth, crates and wicker baskets of every size and containing the gods and their owners only knew what treasures almost crowded one back into the river. Here there was the shouting of many voices, but loudest and most often in Greek. And every word of the tongue I had first heard from my mother’s lips quavered with the excitement of unsatisfied greed, for the purses of merchants, it seemed, are never crammed quite full.

  “That man has tired of life who says, ‘Yes, I have enough,’” said Prodikos, smiling with pride as with his arm he made a gesture that seemed to take in the whole wharf. “Whether he seeks pleasure or land or wealth or glory in battle or knowledge of the world or simply of his own nature, no Greek is ever entirely satisfied. That is our glory and our curse, My Lord Tiglath. That is what separates us from the other races of men—as doubtless the promptings of your own heart have brought you to understand. Come, let us make our way to my poor house, where at least I can offer you a decent dinner and a comfortable bed after our journey.”

  And indeed it was a very decent dinner, consisting of wine from a place called Buto, reputed to possess the finest vineyards in all of Egypt, fruit, emmer cakes and pork roasted in honey—“Enjoy it while you may, My Lord,” Prodikos told me, “for you will have nothing like it in Memphis. The Egyptians regard pigs as unclean and will neither eat their flesh nor allow them to be slaughtered or cooked anywhere within the walls of their cities.”